French Montana might be better known as a Kardashian’s ex-beau than a hip-hop vocalist, and his new album “Jungle Rules” won’t change that.

Although it’s not aggressively off-putting, the release is overlong, overly familiar and unmemorable – a bloated 18-track exercise in formula and repetition.

“Jungle Rules” has a spacious atmosphere about it, spare arrangements making room for hooks from the Moroccan-American South Bronx rapper/singer also known as Karim Kharbouch. A healthy contingent of guests float in and out, some of them making a mark and none of them overshadowing their host for long.

Trouble it, French Montana could use overshadowing. His delivery is solid yet largely anonymous, more the stuff of an ensemble player than a leading man.

“Jungles Rules” comes together when his voice is surrounded by the blissful ambience of Chinx on “Whiskey Eyes,” lifted by the charismatic afro-pop of Swae Lee in “Unforgettable” and directed into a hypnotic lull by his pal The Weeknd on “A Lie.” Likewise, Marc E. Bassy helps Montana put a modern R&B-electro spin on “She Workin” (“Met her last night, moved her in the crib today”), and the always-reliable Pharrell Williams gives him an assist in the woozy strains of “Bring Dem Things.”

“Jungles Rules” falls apart when Montana’s vocals are reduced to echoing refrains adrift in aimlessness with nothing to say and often a beat or two too slow for comfort. Rote lines about women and drinking and drugging and bragging feel hopelessly empty. You know it’s bad when even the siren of “Migo Montana” sounds bored.

At least Montana brings the feels in the disarming psychedelia of “Trippin” and especially in the down-to-earth “Famous,” where he reveals his jealousy and insecurities: “There’s no reason you’d go for a man like me.”

If he could keep that up, even Khloe Kardashian might go for him again.

French Montana

"Jungle Rules"

Rating: 2-1/2 (out 5)

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Waxahatchee weathers "Storm," wins with words

Listening to Waxahatchee’s new “Out in the Storm” is akin to listening to a friend tell a riveting story at an outdoor café as traffic noise alternately accompanies her tale and works against it.

"Out in the Storm," Waxahatchee(Photo: Merge Records)

The fourth album from Waxahatchee – aka Katie Crutchfield, who named her act after a creek in Alabama – is a powerful depiction of sacrificing self while attempting to function in a dysfunctional relationship. Crutchfield’s raspy delivery is punctuated with pain, anger and resoluteness.

And the music? It ebbs and flows.

The arrangements on “Out in the Storm” are serviceable, frontloaded with familiar waves of bracing electricity – apt for the track “Silver,” where she sings, “I went out in the storm, thought I felt the house burnin’” and high-voltage “Never Been Wrong,” where she bristles, “Does it make you feel good to watch me stumbling in the dark?” Yet other tracks find her vocal cadence pitted against disappointingly rote sounds that get in her way – like the mundane arrangement of “Brass Beam,” which underserves a frustrated Crutchfield as she grapples with being the lesser partner in a relationship when, “I just want to sing my songs and sleep through the night.”

Her words may be one-sided, but she paints a vivid picture of apparent emotional abuse, even when she confesses her role as an enabler on “Recite Remorse”: “I always gravitated toward those who are unimpressed.”

Yet Crutchfield is a fighter, and that’s what ultimately makes “Out in the Storm” rewarding. Whether she’s seething with whispered restraint on “8 Ball” (“I am the wind blowing down your trees”), ticking off intolerable humiliations in the jangling “No Question” or simply setting herself free in the gentle acoustic diversion “No Question,” her indominable spirit is life-affirming.

And on closing track “Fade” when Crutchfield sings, “I laid down next to you for three years, shedding my skin/Dreaming about the potential, the person I could have been,” it’s clear she’s going to be that person after all.

Waxahatchee

"Out in the Storm"

Rating: 3-1/2 (out of 5)

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Gospelbeach's fantasy, reality overlap on "Another Summer of Love"

Los Angeles band GospelbeacH taps into a gauzy throwback-rock vibe on “Another Summer of Love” that alternately resonates with old-school Americana realness and ersatz retro fakeness.

"Another Summer of Love" by GospelbeacH(Photo: Alive Records)

Although the authenticity may come and go, at least frontman Brent Rademaker always seems sincere in his nods to the trippy folk/rock of decades ago. The Florida native also brings traces of Southern rock and country to the band’s West Coast milieu.

Gospelbeach’s soundscapes are sometimes painted on bucolic canvases – as on “In the Desert,” where dreamy harmonies back a philosophical Rademaker who muses, “There’s a thousand things I wanna say to you,” and on “You’re Already Home,” where a countrified, bell-accented jangle drives his wanderlust tale of a woman who joins him on his journeys in Tennessee and “lived her life on the run/Every night having fun … That girl was free.”

Escapism has its limits, however, as he notes on the Tom Petty-flavored “Sad Country Boy” (“You wanna run away? You might get somewhere, but you won’t get far”) and in the identity crisis of “The City Limits,” where he digs in his heels for ownership of an adopted town that increasingly estranges him.

The engaging charm of “Another Summer of Love” perseveres through rougher spots, as when the limitations of Rademaker’s unspectacular voice and shticky backing vocals are laid bare in the buzzing rockabilly of “Kathleen” and when muddy overtones smudge “Strange Days” and “Runnin’ Blind” and “I Don’t Wanna Lose You” goes off the rails with clunky pacing.

“California Fantasy” proves most symbolic as the band rolls with a crunchy cadence as the singer ponders, “Is this the kind of California we’ve been dreaming of? What ever happened to the summer of love?”

The whole album has the air of a flashback to a time that never actually existed. And even though you know better, you still want to believe.